Re: If you are interested

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

>>>>> "P" == P Jenner <psj@mustec.eu.org> writes:

    P> On 12 Sep 1999, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
    >> Ok, it was a general search, but does it really make sense to
    >> to international searching without asking?

    P> Maybe but many users will be using different languages - to
    P> default to US English is probably a bad thing. I would also
    P> think that most users could ignore translations they do not
    P> require.

It's up to you of course, but I think it is far less likely that most
users will speak all European languages.  It makes most sense to ask
for the language(s) of preference up front rather than to litter their
search with papers the reader cannot read (unless we licence a
babelfish from AltaVista)  

Based on pure numbers in Internet traffic, having a select box that
defaults to english (with the option to choose another) is not a bad
idea, and if you can deduce the most likely language from the
REMOTE_HOST (trim the end of their host name for the 2-letter country
code), then by all means have the select box set the first-search
language to something other than English, but why should we assume the
average Taiwanese Linux user either knows Italian or doens't mind
wading through three pages of irrelevant Italian before finding what
they seek?  

Lumping languages together is like a bad thesaurus: "Solo" is not the
only case of a technically rare term which is a common word in another
language.  If the documents where somehow semantically linked, say by
having all non-language technical terms in keyword tags, it would be a
different story.

Anyway, it's just my opinion ;) The only real way to tell is to try
it out on the public and see what they do with it.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>  TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Telecom Services : Internet Consulting : http://www.teledyn.com
Linux Writers Workshop Archive: http://www.egroups.com/group/linux-hack/
"You don't play what you know; you play what you hear." -- (Miles Davis)


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